Let’s turn back to 2020, with Covid looming, and me stuck at my parents house, wondering what to do for my master thesis. Luckily the Fraunhofer IOSB was investigating adaptive learning environments for “Bildaufklärer” (radar image object interpreters) at that time, with them being very interested in Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA). And as luck willed it, they were searching for me, a bright, young and motivated thesis student, to create a DDA testbed.
So while the world went mad, I sat at home and studied adaptive learning environments, with the aim of inducing Flow in learners by automatically adjusting the difficulty of learning games to neither be too challenging nor too easy.
I did this by creating a game (😇) with HTML, Typescript and the Phaser framework. Very proud of that one. I procedurally generate a map, then place little cars on it, and let the user find them. As it is a DDA test-bed, it has a lot of knobs and whistles to change the game difficulty, including day-night modus and alien invaders (distractors)!
I unfortunately I can’t demo the game here (Webpack security issues…), but you can read my thesis here — It won an award for best, and also published at CELDA21 (Atorf 2021 “Towards a concept for a hidden object game with dynamic difficulty adjustment”).
A beatifully generated city and world!